Zarina. Home is a Foreign Place.1999

Welcome to Modern Art & Ideas! This course is designed for anyone interested in learning more about modern and contemporary art. Over the next five weeks, you will look at art through a variety of themes: Places & Spaces, Art & Identity, Transforming Everyday Objects, and Art & Society. Each week kicks off with a video that connects works of art from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection to the theme. You will hear audio interviews with artists, designers, and curators and learn more about selected works in the additional readings and resources.
Throughout this course you will discover how artists:
-- represent place and take inspiration from their environment,
-- create works of art to express, explore, and question identity,
-- use everyday objects to challenge assumptions about what constitutes a work of art and how it should be made,
-- and respond to the social, cultural, and political issues of their time through works of art.
Through the discussion forum prompts and peer review assignment, you will also have the opportunity to connect with other learners and explore how these themes resonate with your own life and experience.

강사:

Lisa Mazzola

Assistant Director, School and Teacher Programs

스크립트

My name is Zarina Hashmi. I was born in Aligarh, a small university town, 80 miles South of Delhi. In 1975, I moved to New York. I was on the road for 20 years before I came here. When I was traveling, I always thought that one day I will go home, but over the 40 years, there was nothing to go back to because my family was scattered all over the world. Actually, this piece I just did for myself just to understand how I got here. Home is a foreign place, so language is as important in this piece as the image. It has to be read as a poem. The artist, who goes by her first name, came up with a list of words in Urdu that conjured up the idea of home. Zarina had a calligrapher write these words, which can be seen at the bottom of each panel, and then created a corresponding image. These woodblock prints are meant to be read in rows from left to right starting from the top. The first line is I start by my home. So, I made image of floor plan of the house, and it goes with depth, and then threshold because all these have cultural meanings that you have come to the threshold, and then the door, and the entrance, and the courtyard is very important for me because we spent lot of time outside. In the third row, she describes a time of the day. Look for the fourth panel to the right, it's an image of a ceiling fan. Because I can't think of an afternoon in India without a ceiling fan. In the fifth row, in the far right panel, Zarina illustrates the idea of disappearing language with a musical score. Because when you leave, you leave your country, but you also leave your language, and that is a very big loss because you know you will never speak it, or you will never communicate with other people in the language which you grew up with.